Vermont’s Community Broadband Model, Starlink, and the Future of Search – Episode 10 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:15)
And we’re back for another episode of Unbuffered, your favorite show that has me and Sean talking about stuff. Welcome back. It’s after Memorial Day. The summer might be kicking off in Minnesota. The temps sure seem like it. Sean and I got a few topics to cover. I’m Chris Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and Sean’s with me. Sean Gonsalves. Welcome back, Sean.

Sean Gonsalves (00:23)
Talking about stuff. That’s right.

I’m back. What’s happening?

Christopher Mitchell (00:44)
We

are going to talk today a little bit about, I don’t know, like how wonderful it is. You know, not often the subject of ⁓ podcast topics, but how wonderful it is to see Vermont being so well connected and how far we’ve come in terms of that. We’re gonna talk a little bit about that. don’t know, just, Sean was giving me the update of what’s going on in Vermont and I was just tickled. And then we’re talk a little bit about Starlink and SpaceX.

Sean Gonsalves (00:59)
That’s right.

Christopher Mitchell (01:10)
And then we’re going to finish off this is trying to be a little bit of a tighter show. We’re going to finish off with a What the Tech!?! about Google Search. This is a show that comes to you, gives it to you straight in terms of what we’re thinking about connectivity and technology and the world that we want to live in with those things. So let’s dive into it, Sean. I mean, you’ve been working on a couple of cool stories that will be coming out at some point in the next few weeks.

Sean Gonsalves (01:30)
That’s right.

Christopher Mitchell (01:39)
And along the way, we’re just reminded that Vermont is turning into a haven of high quality Internet access. That’s pretty amazing.

Sean Gonsalves (01:44)
I hate-

It is, it is. It’s not just about cheddar cheese and maple syrup and whatnot, which I hear is fantastic. And believe it or not, Vermont is the only state in New England that I actually haven’t set foot in. I’m embarrassed to say that, but I will be, I’ll be fixing that soon because I have a feeling I’m going to like Vermont a lot. the thing that, that’s right. But the thing that I like about Vermont right now is the fact that their unique

Christopher Mitchell (02:05)
No billboards.

Sean Gonsalves (02:14)
system or their unique program to bring universal connectivity to the most rural state, I look this up, the most rural state in the nation is doing pretty good.

Christopher Mitchell (02:25)
Yeah, I mean,

let’s just be clear, though. It’s the most rural state in terms of having the highest rate of people living in non-metropolitan areas. I feel like anyone that’s listening in Alaska is like, what? W-U-T, what? So there’s lots of definitions for what rural is by the one that has the highest number of people living outside of, or the highest percentage of people living outside rural areas. I think that’s the definition that Vermont hits. Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (02:42)
Right, right, well…

that Vermont has exactly,

which also means that it’s not exactly easy to get particularly fiber to everyone. ⁓ And that is kind of Vermont’s goal. So lately they’ve been, so they just got their portion of the BEAD they were getting 229 million in BEAD funds. They got their first 93, the rest of it is the non-deployment funds. ⁓

And with it, they think they’re gonna be able to get to somewhere around 85 % fiber connectivity across the state with the other, I don’t know, 15 or so percent with cable connectivity and then a smattering of SpaceX type stuff, satellite. So for all intents and purposes, Vermont is gonna be covered in fiber connectivity and they’ve been making some great headway, but they’re not just like building networks, they’re doing a lot of other cool stuff.

So in a story, right, the communication union districts, we need to say the communication union districts for those who are not in the weeds on this stuff. it’s essentially, these are municipal entities that cannot raise taxes. They have to use loans or subscriber revenue in order to fund construction. And they’re basically these municipal entities that are two or more.

Christopher Mitchell (03:47)
It’s how they’re doing it that is just lovely, I think. I mean, it’s just really elegant. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (04:12)
There’s nine of them across the state right now that have multiple towns in each. And that is the primary vehicle that the state has chosen to be their driver of connectivity. It’s not that they’re leaving out private ISPs or even some of the bigger ones in a couple of the few cities that are in Vermont. Those are there and they’re a part of the mix. But what they’re doing with the Communication Union Districts is really cool. They’ve also… ⁓

They’ve also created an apprenticeship program. So they are actually training fiber technicians in the state who will then be building these networks. They’ve got a graduating class that they just graduated with another cohort this past Friday, right before Memorial Day weekend. They’ve got ⁓ in one particular, I think it’s Maple Broadband and I forget which part of the state that’s in. However, what they have is a program for the 700 nonprofits in their region.

where they can get their symmetrical gig for their lowest price, which is like something like 60 bucks a month. So it’s a huge boon to the community. And then they also put out this really cool short video called Connection Day, which follows the Burke family. And when they got fiber for the first time, where they live in Marlboro, Vermont, and the video is, I mean, is excellent. And it really captures what this stuff really means on the ground where…

Christopher Mitchell (05:19)
Hmm

Sean Gonsalves (05:39)
You’ve got a husband who has his business that he works remotely, how transformative the fiber is for that, ⁓ his wife and his kids who are college-aged kids and how transformative this connection is for their lives. So folks should go check that out because it’s only like two minutes and 50 seconds, but it really manages to tell a whole story about what all of this means. so Vermont.

Christopher Mitchell (06:04)
This wasn’t inevitable. I remember 15 years ago, I want to say. So, I mean, it goes back to Tim Nulty starting Burlington Telecom and then him having some personality disputes with the chief administrative officer of a new mayor who came in after they’d been going underway. That new mayor and that chief administrative officer

Sean Gonsalves (06:06)
Not at all.

Christopher Mitchell (06:29)
kind of screwing the pooch on Burlington. No one ever really figured out where all the money went, but a lot of money got spent somehow attributed to Burlington Telecom. They didn’t hit their targets. ⁓ And yet it was still providing a great service. And so people were conflicted because now you have this deficit and this great thing. So they ended up privatizing that. And ⁓ there’s sort of a sense in Vermont that like community networks aren’t gonna be that great. And…

Vermont already is a place in which a lot of money had been dumped into wireless facilities. This idea that it’s so rural, fiber was uneconomical. And so they want to put wires. But people in Vermont love their viewsheds and they didn’t want a bunch of wireless towers. And they fought them and made sure we didn’t have a bunch of towers there.

Sean Gonsalves (07:03)
No.

Christopher Mitchell (07:11)
And so there was like two different rounds in which people were like, wireless is the answer. We just have to crush that local independent spirit and they weren’t able to. And so we come up and EC fiber builds this fiber network. know, again, Tim Nulty and a bunch of folks there in East Central Vermont who come together, they raise the money, they self-fund a lot of it. They demonstrate the model works. They try to get money from the federal government. They mostly don’t. The state of Vermont is not enthusiastic about it. And then over time, there’s this big switch.

Sean Gonsalves (07:14)
So

Christopher Mitchell (07:39)
and people recognize that this is a good model for Vermont and new leaders emerge. And your story that you just wrote about this that is linked to, Jordan’s going to make sure we have a link to that in this show, really just covers it and how great is how many different people you quoted that have stepped up and made sure that Vermont got the money that was coming to them from the federal government, made sure it was used in as wise a way as it could be used. The towns that had all these local meetings, these local boards that stepped up, it’s a real success in like seeing

Sean Gonsalves (07:55)
That’s right.

Christopher Mitchell (08:07)
multiple efforts of top-down wireless failing, and then people actually embracing a role within their community, forming these boards, and coming up with a solution that really works. And I think it’s gonna hold for, it’s gonna be a model for moving forward.

Sean Gonsalves (08:18)
Yeah.

Yeah, a couple quick things just to add before we move on, which is that in that story that I wrote, we link to the in-depth report that we did on Vermont that Ry and Jess put together, which is, mean, anything you want to know about how Vermont did it is in that report and it’s fantastic. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (08:37)
right co-published

with the Benton Institute

Sean Gonsalves (08:39)
That’s right, with Benton Institute. So that’s a fantastic report. ⁓ And the other thing I should mention is that as it relates to Vermont, even though kind of prompted the story was the fact that in February they got their BEAD out or at least a portion, a big portion of their BEAD allocation. They’re still waiting for the non-deployment funds, which will really determine if the works out well for them. But all of the work that Vermont has been able to do, and this is really important as we’re all talking about BEAD, which is that Vermont used a lot of American rescue plan money to

get behind this effort. And so a lot of the work, the lion’s share almost, you could say, was done prior to BEAD and using things like the American Rescue Plan. I’m sure there’s some USDA grant money that was involved in state funds and what have you. But most of the work that they’ve done have been through without using BEAD. So I think that’s ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (09:21)
Mm-hmm.

Right. And this is this is a model of a program, right? The rescue plan for people who don’t follow this closely is like there’s two ends of a spectrum of how government can kind of do things. Right. And like one of them is the rescue plan, which is the government basically says, here’s a bunch of money and here’s a bunch of allowed uses for that money. You decide at the state and at the local level how you want to use that money. You set the priorities for it. You can’t color outside the lines, but you’ve got broad authorization. And the other end is the BEAD program.

Sean Gonsalves (09:40)
Hmm.

That’s right.

Christopher Mitchell (09:59)
in the BEAD program was we’re going to figure out this comprehensive program. It’s going to be slower moving. But we’re going to make sure that everyone is going to be comprehensive. And comprehensive takes time. We’re going to make sure that all these boxes are checked. And I think that program would have worked out if it had been allowed to continue before the Trump administration decided to undermine it and stretch it out. ⁓ that’s you’re pointing out that when it came to Vermont, giving them

broader authority and the lump of funds, they chose to spend it in this way and it was wise. So those are two different programs that came out of the COVID spending.

Sean Gonsalves (10:35)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (10:38)
Yeah, I think it’s a great story. And ⁓ it’s just great to see all the local leadership that has sprung up around Vermont. And I’m sure some people are frustrated and stuff isn’t without friction, but it’s really good.

Sean Gonsalves (10:49)
The last

thing too is that, in this kind of like political moment we’re in, I think there’s a huge hunger for community organizing and ⁓ local power. And in this particular sector, this is a real way of building community and building something tangible and lasting that brings people together and that connects people. So ⁓ that’s one of the reasons that I think… ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (11:02)
Mm-hmm.

Sean Gonsalves (11:19)
what makes community networks so cool, particularly now, is that it is a tangible thing that can really flex local power ⁓ when done right.

Christopher Mitchell (11:30)
Yeah, builds those relationships, leads to workforce development programs and things like that. So I think it’s great. And I hope it continues. I hope we don’t see a consolidation into two CUDs across the state or town. That could be a natural consequence. Yeah, right. Right. And I think that made sense. I mean, I think it’s still pretty regional. I’ve said before, we consider North Carolina, North Carolina, sorry, North Dakota, North Carolina, if only it had followed the North.

Sean Gonsalves (11:42)
Hmm. Well, we’ve already seen, we’ve already seen one combined into two or two to combine into one. They used to have 10 and now they’re nine. Yeah. Yeah.

I’m

Christopher Mitchell (11:58)
Dakota

or the so in North Dakota you have all of these ⁓ telephone cooperatives a few independent local telephone companies and maybe an electric co-op or two I don’t know if that’s true I think it’s mostly telephone cooperatives and they were responsive and they built out fiber 20 years ago and you know they did it with federal programs but they were smart about it.

And it was just real success. And I think if there was two or one co-ops in North Dakota, we wouldn’t have seen that because they wouldn’t have been as responsive to local needs and things like that. And so I just feel like it is important to recognize that it’s not just that it’s publicly owned. It’s not just that there’s a civic spirit, but also that it remains somewhat local. The economy of scale really does matter in terms of the long-term interests of the community remaining paramount and not just getting sidelined.

for convenience, because it is hard. People have to volunteer their time to keep these things going.

Sean Gonsalves (12:53)
Yeah, and these projects typically take longer than an election cycle. You know, or I’d say typically necessarily, but often. And so it’s also not one of those kind of like projects or programs where if you’re running for office and you’re looking for stuff to brag about what you’ve done in the time that you’ve been in office, you know, it doesn’t necessarily fit into that time scale.

Christopher Mitchell (13:14)
Right. All right. We’re going talk briefly about Starlink and along this, I’ll see if I can figure out if I should do a longer show about SpaceX going public in the IPO. I think there’s some interesting stuff in there. I don’t know. I don’t know. It depends on, I’ll probably talk to Blair Levin, see how enthusiastic he might be about it. See if we can get a guest that would actually be very knowledgeable. But ⁓ the fact that Starlink is part of SpaceX, which is filing for IPO means we’re getting some more information and we’re seeing a lot more attention on it.

And so I think, don’t know how much you’ve been reading about this, Sean, but I’ve been digging into it a little bit when I wasn’t, was out camping and so.

Sean Gonsalves (13:48)
here and there. I know that

they’ve got their little mini dish coming out with the batteries. I don’t know how much of ⁓ a game changer that’ll be, but…

Christopher Mitchell (13:58)
I don’t

think that’s going to be a huge game changer. I’m it’s going to be great. mean, when we were up in Alaska for the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp we did up in Bristol Bay recently, we got a tour of one of the salmon boats that goes out there. And mostly during the month of June, it’s like four weeks, depending on the local cycles and what’s happening with the salmon, how they’re running. But they’re out there. And that connection to the Internet is key. Because among other things, they’re not out there fishing 24-7. In order to make sure.

Sean Gonsalves (14:13)
Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (14:27)
that they’re not harming the long-term sustainability of the fishery. They’re in contact with people who are regulators back on shore basically or somewhere who are measuring things or they’re looking at how the fish are moving and all kinds of other stuff. I mean, I may have already butchered a little bit about how they do it, but I was interested to know that they get times in which they can go and then they have times when there’s windows that open and close. They gotta know what’s going on. They gotta know what might be changing with the rules.

Sean Gonsalves (14:34)
⁓ okay. Uh-huh.

Yeah. So they’ve

got the star link on the boats there.

Christopher Mitchell (14:54)
Yeah, so I mean, you could have, obviously, they have radios and things like that as well. But I think the Starlink is pretty key, or some kind of Internet access. And Starlink is the best one ⁓ in those areas is the impression I got.

Sean Gonsalves (14:58)
Alright.

If

I was on that boat, would have been like, look, the Starlink dish. then everybody, the tension we diverted, I grabbed me a salmon. I love salmon.

Christopher Mitchell (15:15)
⁓ Well, the thing is also like if you’re out there and

and you’re waiting for go time, you know, like you’re going to be doing something right and people are going to be whether there’s not I’m sure there’s not all just work to be done. There’s some sometimes when people they need a break and they want to be entertained and that sort of thing. So, you know, it’s pretty important if you can run that off of less juice, you know, on batteries and things like that is going to be a lot better for folks. And it’s a major use case for it is on boats. So ⁓

Sean Gonsalves (15:22)
Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (15:44)
Anyway, Starlink, as of the end of quarter one, I guess, I’ve seen some different numbers, but has more than 10 million subscribers, which means that basically over the course of two years, it went from 2.5 in one year to 5 million and now ⁓ to 10.3 million. ⁓ It’s in 155 countries or more at this point. ⁓ I think it’s interesting. The price is in flux, right? We keep, I feel like every week there’s like multiple stories. The price is going down, the price is going up. It’s all over the place. SpaceX,

recently filed with the Federal Communications Commission that it thinks the Universal Service Fund should be done, that we should be ⁓ not having a Universal Service Fund. The Universal Service Fund is what is essential for a lot of the folks that you and I support, the co-ops and the small independent companies.

Sean Gonsalves (16:30)
That’s right. Lifeline, the potential

for another ACP like program. mean.

Christopher Mitchell (16:36)
Just in terms of like yanking it, mean?

Sean Gonsalves (16:39)
Yeah, like or having ⁓ a permanent funding source to you know for the like those type of programs, you know is important to

Christopher Mitchell (16:45)
Well, the

argument from SpaceX is that universal service is here at the cost that whatever SpaceX is charging for it that month. And so there is no need to continue providing service to these thousand local companies that are providing service in many rural areas.

Sean Gonsalves (16:57)
Remind me.

Remind me recently, what happened with the launch, right? Wasn’t this launch, wasn’t this launch supposed to be a thing to get the, because they need more capacity, right? And this launch is super important. So what happened?

Christopher Mitchell (17:08)
Yeah. So there’s a big launch. Right. Right.

So in order for SpaceX to continue ⁓ staying in front of the demand curve, basically, so as they add more people, there’s more people, but each individual user typically uses more capacity over time. And so they could add more of the V2 birds up in the sky, basically the satellites. But they also want to launch these V3 ones. But the V3s are so big.

that the launch them at scale, they need a bigger launch vehicle than the Falcon 9, if I’m remembering this all correctly. And so they’ve been hoping to get Starship operational. Starship has a much larger capacity. Now Starship has launched successfully two times in a row now, I want to say, like, or semi-successfully, depending on how you want to call it. They’re learning a lot from the launches, but they haven’t had a really big setback, like we’ve been talking about a year ago. They still haven’t hit their targets, right? I mean, these are suborbital launches.

Sean Gonsalves (17:42)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (18:07)
They’re with a fraction of what they say they’re going to need to carry. But there is a sense that they’ll be able to start launching the V3 rockets at some point. Now, SpaceX, I think, has made predictions, but I don’t think those are worth paying any attention to, frankly, because they lie all the time about and they’re just constantly. mean, Elon Musk’s companies consistently claim things that don’t come true and no one seems to hold it against them. It doesn’t doesn’t punish them in the stock price regarding the self-driving regarding any number of the products that they launch. So

⁓ I’m not going to pay too much attention to what they say, but it is clear that they are getting closer to Starship being able to get their V3 satellites up, which will then improve their capacity in a variety of ways. So I think, you know, we’ll see what happens there. ⁓ But I want to also say about USF quick, ⁓ Universal Service Fund. This would be really devastating if the FCC decides to get rid of that and say, hey,

Sean Gonsalves (18:39)
Yeah.

Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (19:05)
There’s a thousand, I don’t know what the number is, it’s somewhere between 500 and 1500, I’m guessing, of the companies that you and I think of, like members of the broadband, of the Rural Broadband Association and NTCA, a lot of times locally rooted companies providing good jobs, providing great customer service generally on high quality connections that they’ve been building out largely with support from Uncle Sam. And ⁓ SpaceX is basically, we can provide service to all these locations. Now it can’t.

Sean Gonsalves (19:18)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (19:34)
Right? mean, like, A, we know that they can’t handle an influx of another 10 million subscribers. ⁓ Over time, they may or may not be able to, depending on things we don’t know yet. We know that they can’t service a bunch of people that have dense trees around them in the canopy. ⁓ We know that they can’t serve people a high quality product when they have a holler, you know, when they’re stuck down in a valley and they’ve got ridges around them. ⁓ And we don’t really know where all these people are because no one’s really bothered to have a serious map.

of what’s available. And so I think this is a show in which I wanted to talk a little bit about what SpaceX is up to, but to remind people that before we make a major decision about universal service, we really need to know more information, which would require tracking more information than the Federal Communications Commission has ever accurately tracked. So I have no patience for the idea that we should just get rid of the universal service fund and then people will have.

like we’ll have a thousand companies that slowly go bankrupt over time depending on whether or not they can continue with the economics that they’ve long had, which is premised on the idea that everyone in the United States should have some baseline level of communications ability. So I see you want to say something, but let me just wrap this thought together, which is that moving to SpaceX means we would just be cutting a bunch of people loose.

Sean Gonsalves (20:46)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (20:56)
And for some people, they’d be getting a service that was good enough. They’d be losing good customer service, right? SpaceX has awful, Starlink specifically, it’s awful customer service. You see that over and over again in reviews. And so if you need someone to help hold your hand with the technology, you’re gonna lose that because SpaceX has no interest in that. SpaceX is just gonna provide service to the people it can connect who are willing to pay whatever price they can charge.

Sean Gonsalves (21:06)
Hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (21:23)
And that’s going to be more in one part of Missouri than in a different part of Missouri. just it’s all based on the market, which I don’t know. I don’t have a knee-jerk reaction to say that’s impossible to do that well. But abandoning people to a monopoly that we already know can’t serve the whole need and can’t serve certain people in some geographies. And we don’t even know who those people are, where they are. There’s no sense of what we’re going to do with other stuff.

⁓ Anyway, it just makes me nervous. We live in non-serious times with Congress, doesn’t take these problems seriously. The Federal Communications Commission does not take this stuff seriously. And we may see decisions that are made without any real consideration as to the impact.

Sean Gonsalves (22:02)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, the thing that I was just gonna say isn’t really anything profound, my, you know, my frame of mind is that I’m just not a fan, whether it’s this, whether it’s USF or other things of just tearing things down without there being something in place that’s real and tangible. like, you know, I don’t want you to, like, I may have a lot of problems with my house, but I don’t want you to tear down my house and then I just, I’m just living in the woods.

because you have an idea of something that’s gonna solve, you know, get me a better house, you say. Like it just, you know.

Christopher Mitchell (22:37)
But if you

extract that out to numbers, like tearing down 100 people’s houses and saying, well, 80 of them are going to end up in a better spot. Yeah, 20 of them are going to live in a cave. But like, you know, the 80 of them are going to be better off. on average, and this is, this is the problem is when you start thinking about like in that term, on average, people are better off. Well, no, that’s not how we do essential communication services. you know, like communications is key. It is key to how we organize the economy. It is key to education. It is key to having opportunities in life.

Sean Gonsalves (22:48)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (23:07)
And it’s key to what we do. We’re a social species. I feel like people don’t always appreciate that. Even if one was just like, you don’t need Netflix to live, you need some communications to be able to live as a human being. Otherwise, you turn into ⁓ someone who, frankly, could be quite destructive. And so there’s a variety of reasons we want to keep people healthy. ⁓ So with that said, I’d be interested if people really want to hear us do a deeper dive into the IPO and what we know about SpaceX. They should let us know.

Sean Gonsalves (23:33)
you should hear what the people say.

Christopher Mitchell (23:36)
And if they really don’t want us to waste a show on that, then I’d like to know that too. But before we go, Sean, I want to ask you a question. What the Tech!?!

Sean Gonsalves (23:40)
Okay.

What the Tech!?! So for me, and I don’t know what to think about this yet. It’s way too early, but you know, what do call it? Google was at the, what do they call it? The iO thing where they, their big summit where they unveiled this thing. And so apparently now Google search is now, you know, turning into completely AI where you’re not, where they’re not really showing you clickable links anymore. It’s basically the AI doing the searching for you and telling you what the, what the answers are.

Christopher Mitchell (23:56)
Yeah, their IO, their big summit where they announce like where things are going.

Sean Gonsalves (24:14)
It, you know, there’s all the bells and whistles about how now the search bar is expanded and you can add stuff to it. And there’s a lot of things that sound kind of cool, but to me, it feels like a lot of it is geared towards how to make us, how to make shopping more cool. I don’t, I don’t. And also I get the impression from folks that are following this closely that, first of all, this is like the first time that they’ve changed their search bar like this or.

this drastically since like, I don’t know, like 2001 or something like that. It’s been a long time, but that this is a major, major change to the way we are used to using Google and Google search that we don’t yet know what all the ripple effects are in the cascading effects that could be numerous and many that folks. So I, so when I’m saying what the Tech on that, I’m not so much as making a judgment yet because I haven’t really dove into it, but

It feels like this is ⁓ a major move ⁓ from Google in expanding AI into their services and further integrating AI into everything that we do.

Christopher Mitchell (25:27)
So one of the things that I’ve heard about this is from The Verge, and I just have tremendous respect for them.

And so one of the things that Google believes or is trying to get other people to believe is that the result of this is that down the road, we run the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And right now we get a fair amount of people that come to us because they did a search for something in Google and then they got a result that pointed them to something within the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s website. And we’re supposed to believe that in the future we will get fewer people coming to us from Google.

but they will be more interested in what they’re doing. So we’ll get fewer people who are like, this wasn’t really what I was looking for, and more people who are like, yes, this is what my soul needs is this content. ⁓ And so I don’t know. I don’t understand the point of this yet. Like I said, I’m behind because I’m still getting over some camping fun. I didn’t pay attention to any of the Tech news or anything over the weekend. So ⁓ I’m still trying to catch up a bit. Yeah. ⁓

Sean Gonsalves (26:31)
Good. Good.

Christopher Mitchell (26:34)
But I will say that I don’t like it. I’m deeply nervous about Google making content on the Internet developed by humans ⁓ less able to find it. And I’m concerned about the future trends.

Sean Gonsalves (26:37)
I’m deep same.

Right.

Me too. Me too. I’m concerned about, you know, further in shitification. And yes, it sounds cool. Like, for example, I heard them on the Verge talking about the ability to like, like, it will be able to like, say you’re gonna make a trip someplace, it will create like an app for you that will like, design the whole trip and everything. And like, okay, yeah, I guess that’s cool and all that. But like, I don’t care about that stuff. You know, like,

Christopher Mitchell (27:12)
Yeah, 100%.

Sean Gonsalves (27:14)
I don’t need you to, but to me, feel like this is, it has like Google, like how can we continue to be and be an even bigger middleman in as a platform and all that platform economics and everything. And to capture users and businesses in this like ⁓ ecosystem that you can’t escape. And that can just extract more and more and more and more out. And I, I’m just nervous about it. And especially whenever somebody invents something and everybody’s ooh and an on about something.

about things that people weren’t asking for, it makes me nervous.

Christopher Mitchell (27:47)
Well, especially when it feels like they’re just trying to figure out how to use more and more cycles of AI. And I don’t get it. Like, people are not in a, there’s not a sense that people like more AI in my life. And so I’m just, I don’t know how much of this is like Google trying to like just impress Wall Street. Cause there’s so much of this, right? Where they’re just like, if we can use more AI, more people on Wall Street are going to think we’re the future. And there’s this like, this is game of trying to guess what other people are thinking. And, and it drives me crazy.

Sean Gonsalves (28:09)
Right.

And

I guess they got to figure, you know, I guess, you know, what is behind all of this too, is just this need to, we got to start figuring out how to make money off of this stuff. Cause right now it’s a money pit.

Christopher Mitchell (28:25)
Right. Yeah, and that’s the thing is I don’t get how they think this is going to help them make more money. But maybe we’ll find out about it and we’ll talk about it ⁓ in a future show. ⁓ In the meantime, Sean, thank you for hopping on. And we’re going to have some fun shows coming up. We’re going to be getting an update, I think. We’re going to do a show with Josh Edmonds soon, getting a sense of what’s going on there in Cleveland with Digital C and perhaps elsewhere.

Sean Gonsalves (28:40)
Yes, sir.

yeah, that’s gonna be good.

Christopher Mitchell (28:51)
We’re gonna be I think learning more about What’s going on in Longmont, Colorado? I’m gonna check back in with them and we got some other shows that we’re working on that I’m excited about so ⁓ yeah, we got we’re have some fun shows coming up and hope you all have a good start of the summer and ⁓ Take care. Thanks for listening

Sean Gonsalves (29:13)
All right.

Jordan Pittman (29:16)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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